Hardware suggestion for a non-permanent event for 200 very low BW but concurrent users in the same place

[teddy_bouziat]

Hi,

I need a specific architecture for an event that we propose around video gaming.

The purpose is to make 200 concurrent players, in the same place, using their smartphones connected to through WIFI to a "local gaming server" to play a game running on a giant screen:

 My "homemade tests" on our prototype shows that the bandwidth by player does not exceed 8kB/s so the available bandwidth on the network should not be an issue.

What I'm afraid of is the stability of the connection for an user because of the "congestion" of the wifi frequencies, that is why I need a professional solution.

What is the access point model I need for an INDOOR event with 200 players ?

What is the access point model I need for an OUTDOOR event with 200 players ?

Finally, is a outdoor access point can be used indoor ?

Best regards.

[robert_lowe_722]

My first question would be about latency tolerance for your game. Although you need a small amount of bandwidth per user, you could still experience latency issues due to utilisation of the frequency.  

[teddy_bouziat]

Thank for your response.
This is a very good question, I think the game experience is still good if the ping is under 100ms. Do you think it is a reachable objective ?

[andrew_giancol1]

I would add this - if you cluster APs, say two APs a few feet from each other, you can take advantage of "client load balancing".  in this way, you can specify that an AP with 50 clients get redistributes this traffic across all adjacent APs. 
Also, in your tests, unless your firewall is "Dropping" all other network traffic, you're forgetting that once client devices join the network, their traffic will include things like application check-ins, location data, updates and so on. you're most certainly going to be dealing with more than 8kb/s for these other non-planned consumers of your bandwidth.

Professionally speaking, you may consider limiting this "other" traffic at your firewall, dropping all Multicast, using client isolation (so your clients cannot see each other) and possibly using OpenDNS's family shield to further limit (torrents) and other traffic which will otherwise, just suck the life out of your network.

[robert_lowe_722]

So what you are asking for latency wise is similar to VoIP. This is latency dependant and puts a heavy requirement on available airtime.

Andew makes a good point about 'additional traffic' these devices will be sending background data for sure. And while you may be able to drop the packets at your firewall you wont stop them consuming airtime. By my calculations, using Ekahau capacity planning, for 5GHz only radio's you will start to hit 50% airtime utilisation on a 20MHz channel at about 45 clients. So, if you want to support 200 then you are looking at approx 5 x 5GHZ radio's with clients evenly split (manually via separate SSID's would be the best way to force it for a specific purpose such as this. 

There's still a good few assumptions in there regards min data rate etc and smartphone type.